Thesis: Haefeli and Sweeney's goal for this text is to study the individual lives of the people, captors and captives of the Deerfield, Mass. raid of 1704, and "analyze the forces that overshadowed them" in the traditional historical milieu (7).

Themes: Culture is one the main themes featured in this text. The French and Native alliance brought about some major differences in culture, especially when it came to war strategy. Many of the Native strategies went against the European Code of War and both cultures had to compromise on their strategies in order for the alliance to be successful (103). There was also a huge push on the captors part to integrate captives into their culture and lifestyle. According to the authors, captives had to be accepted as "kin (152)."Because of their common European culture, English captives were a lot easier to integrate into the New France …show more content…
This is followed by an introduction giving a brief history of Deerfield and the ideas behind the publication of this text. The book is then broken up into four parts: Creating Communities, The Raid, Negotiating Empires, and Preserving Communities. Within those four parts are thirteen chapters: one through four in part one, five through seven in part two, eight through ten in part three, and eleven through thirteen in part four. Each of the chapters plays an important role in each part; the first chapter being an beginning and the last chapter concluding the part and transiting into the next part very fluidly. They end the text with an conclusion/afterward on remembering the Deerfield raid today. This is followed by six appendixes filled with demographic information such as lists of Deerfield captives, identities of Native people, and the fates of the New England Captives. The book itself ends with an extensive note section, and very organized and detailed bibliography, and an